We would think AI music should fall into that category. As I said, there is absolutely something slightly disturbing about the thought that music is being created and fed to us through algorithms rather than inspiration. I completely understand the antipathy, and then...
I began experimenting with the AI behind some of this music. I have mentioned my own experience as a failed musician countless times over the years, because that colors everything I think and say about music. Creating for myself gives me insight into the process, but more importantly it gives me an over-arching philosophy of what the art is that perhaps most listeners have never given any thought to. You can't be merely a 'casual listener' if you are neck-deep in the process yourself.
Curious, I opened the AI program, and I plugged in a set of lyrics that had never amounted to anything. After typing in a few quick prompts, I pressed the button and waited while the spinning wheel told me the algorithm was hard at work turning my words into a song. I doubted it could find 'my voice', so to speak, as every human singer I have shown my work to has told me my cadences and metaphors are unique to me... and perhaps a bit difficult for anyone else to wrap their heads around. My wiring is unusual... color me surprised...
When the wheel stopped, and the play button appeared, I was expecting to laugh at the results. I listened, and the vocal was indeed plastic and artificial, but the song itself wasn't. The 'composition' I was listening to hit the right marks, found the right atmosphere, and delivered a melody that was immediately familiar, yet sharper and catchier than anything I had tried and failed to sing for myself. I was intrigued.
The experiment continued, and I transformed more and more lyrics. Quickly, I was amassing a set of songs that sounded objectively bad, but were doing for me what I could never do for myself. After all my favorites were turned into the singer/songwriter material I had always imagined, I started experimenting with my more emo side, and even more lyrics got turned into heavier songs that fed a side of my personality that was always dormant in the background. I could not in good conscience tell anyone it was great music, but in the back of my head the thought was developing.
As luck would have it, only a few days after I finished my experiment, the program released a new and improved modeler. I put one of the songs it gave me back into the algorithm, and waited to see how dramatic the difference from one week to the next could be. I would not have believed the result could be a quantum leap forward, and yet that's exactly what it was. The same song that was promising but robotic became all too human. The sound expanded, the details bursting forth, and the vocal now sounding almost perfect. I was floored that I was listening to 'my' song, not only played better than I could, but sung better than any of the demos I had received over these last two-plus years from real singers.
I kept on, running all of the songs through the new model, and when I was done I had two full albums of songs that I was struggling to wrap my head around. They were my songs, and many of them borrowed the contours I sang the language with, but they were more than I had ever dreamed of. My imagination is not vivid, and my hopes were always small enough to fit into a card slot in my wallet. This, while not 'real' in the sense of the word, was more real than anything I heard echoing in my daydreams.
That brings us to the crux of today's discussion, which is to address what this means for music going forward. My experiences have told me all along that there are countless people out there with great ideas, and with the drive to make great art, but who lack the requisite talents or connections to make it happen. The human limitations keep us from reaching the intellectual potential we have, and AI is helping to democratize talent, in a way. I have skill as a lyricist, but no facility as a singer, so AI is able to step in and give me a voice my body cannot. Is that so different than bands bringing in studio musicians to play the parts they could not master for themselves? Maybe not.
But what this really means is our relationship with music might need an adjustment. Our love of particular artists, and our obsessions with them, will not come necessarily from their ability to twist notes into fascinating riffs and melodies, but in the way they connect to us on a human level. To once again reference Taylor Swift; the reason she is the biggest artist in the world right now is not that she writes the best pop songs (that's a debate), but because her persona and lyrics speak to people in a way they relate to.
THAT is what music is going to become. AI is a useful tool in helping us to flesh out our ideas, but it is the ideas themselves that will only grow more important as this proliferates. A lyric that speaks to people's lives will elevate a song more than a vocal that is perfectly in tune every nanosecond of a performance. Writers with something to say, something important to say, will still stand out from the crowd of basic language every algorithm will piece together from raw syntax.
So... do I love the songs AI helped me create because they are great songs, or because they are my songs that express some of my deepest thoughts?
Both might be true, but it is the latter that makes them important. Catchy songs are great, and they're fun, but so many of them exist already that more of them aren't going to stay with us. Songs that mean something to us will, and what's the harm in AI helping people with something to say be able to have their message reach us?
Speaking from experience, it can be the difference between pride and depression, between feeling like you've accomplished something and wanting to give up on everything. I'm not in a rush to take that away from anyone, myself included.
No comments:
Post a Comment